Supporting Students with Remote Teams: Rethinking Student Service Staffing within a Traditional University

Concurrent Session 8
Leadership

Brief Abstract

The online unit of a traditional land grant institution leveraged return to work conversations to reimagine the future of work and its workforce. Learn how the student experience team operationalized the idea of “online on purpose” to meet student (and employee) needs by intentionally building a fully-remote student services workforce.

Presenters

Extended Abstract

The online unit of a traditional land grant institution leveraged return to work conversations to reimagine the future of work and its workforce. The student experience team within that online unit works with prospective and current graduate-level learners to ensure a seamless journey from exploring options, applying, enrolling, creating a plan of study, to ultimately achieving learning objectives (earning a degree or completing a professional development offering). In addition to working with learners, the student experience team provides full support in exploring, planning, and launching new professional, continuing, and online education offerings

This session will highlight a newly restructured student engagement team (nested within the student experience area) as a case study for a new model of staffing within a traditional institution. Composed of recruiting, admissions, advising, and student success coaching, the student engagement team has grown rapidly over the last 9 months - adding a senior manager, four part-time sub-team managers, and over a dozen new staff. To recruit and retain the best available talent, the team has intentionally focused on hiring for fully remote positions. By the end of 2022 the team will have 30+ full time, fully remote.As an added layer of complexity, all of these positions are matrixed and include a dotted line to the programs and/or departments funding the position. 

We will share tips, tricks, and early successes (and mistakes!) as we walk through the evolution of the team structure.During this session, learn from our experience:

  • Designing position descriptions, running searches, and selecting the most highly qualified applicants;

  • Onboarding new employees;

  • Structuring teams, including team size, manager load, salary setting, and leveling; 

  • Managing team performance, development, and cohesion; 

  • Retaining and advancing talented employees; 

  • Establishing a culture of transparency, collaboration, and innovation;

  • and more! 

Attendees will be strongly encouraged to share their experiences with building and managing remote teams - whether “online on purpose” or online as a byproduct of the COVID era - and will participate in a series of benchmarking polls and small group conversations. Our goal is to use our experience as a starting point for a robust and collaborative discussion of innovative staffing models within traditional institutional settings. The content of this session will focus predominantly on the organizational and managerial considerations of utilization intentionally remote teams. There will be only brief coverage of the day-to-day functional work of these teams - primarily shared through examples of cross-team collaborations.